Comments on the Rule of Law

From Freedom's Nest:

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
- Edmund Burke
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The more laws, the less justice.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
- Thomas Jefferson
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It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
- Thomas Jefferson
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You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
- Lyndon Johnson
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The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
- H.L. Mencken
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The prevailing legal and moral views of a time are held not only by those whom they benefit but by those, too, who appear to suffer from them. Their domination is expressed in that fact- that the people from whom they claim sacrifice accept them.
- Ludwig von Mises
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It is a grave error to suppose that a dictatorship rules a nation by means of strict, rigid laws which are obeyed and enforced with rigorous, military precision. Such a rule would be evil, but almost bearable; men could endure the harshest edicts, provided these edicts were known, specific and stable; it is not the known that breaks men's spirits, but the unpredictable. A dictatorship has to be capricious; it has to rule by means of the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the wantonly irrational; it has to deal not in death, but in sudden death; a state of chronic uncertainty is what men are psychologically unable to bear.
- Ayn Rand
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There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
- Ayn Rand
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Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.
- Ayn Rand
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We vote too much. We deliberate too little. We have brought within the scope of the federal jurisdiction a vast number of subjects that do not belong here, but are nevertheless here. What we need to do is to stop passing laws. We have enough laws now to govern the world for the next ten thousand years.
- James Alexander Reed
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One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
- Thomas Brackett Reed
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To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The more corrupt the State the more numerous the laws.
- Cornelius Tacitus
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The law giver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.
- H.G. Wells